Sewing Machine Success

This morning I hurried to get showered and dressed and topped up with tea so I’d have time to clear space on the dining room table.

A year or two ago, I sold one of my sewing machines to my friend Debbie, who bought it as a gift for her daughter Marian. Well, Marian didn’t try to use it until recently. And it had problems. This surprised me, because of all my “spare” machines that I had used for home-ec classes, this was the nicest. It had been working well when I sold it.

So since Marian was going to be in town today, we arranged for her to bring the machine over so I could see if I could figure out what was going on. Before she arrived, my best guess was that it might be a threading mistake.

We set up the machine and tried to run it so she could show me the problem. There definitely was a problem! The first problem I noticed was that the feed dogs weren’t moving the fabric forward at all. That was fairly easy to solve—she had the stitch length set at “0.”

Then I thought maybe there was a problem with the bobbin assembly, so we took it apart and then really had to struggle to get everything back in. It was fine. That’s when I finally thought to check the threading, and sure enough, something had been skipped. Once the machine was properly threaded, it ran like the proverbial top. We were both thrilled. Threading mistakes are so easy to make, especially if you’re not familiar with the machine. So it took us about an hour, but we declared victory!

I hope that machine serves her well for many years to come.

After she left, I had two boxes to pack and address, and then I headed off to the post office to get them in the mail. The cost of mailing packages is pretty daunting these days, but I guess still cheaper than driving hundreds of miles to deliver things in person.

From there I went straight to Aldi to do the grocery shopping and as I was leaving I encountered Walter’s old boss and his wife. When I say “old” boss, I mean from decades ago! It was good to see them.

After looking into three different support organizations, we have narrowed it down to two. The third one, which has a lot to recommend it, is not a good fit for us since we aren’t the right flavor of Baptist for them. So Walter has asked to speak to someone from the other two so we can ask questions and get a better idea of which might be best for us. We’ll be talking to one of them on Monday, so we’d appreciate prayer for that.

I spent much of the afternoon cooking and then picking and chopping a lot of chicken, and also hanging up the laundry I washed this morning and catching up on my Bible reading. I’m in the book of Job right now, reading about Job and his unhelpful frenemies.

Joy Spark: Getting that sewing machine working again!